James Gandolfini, Saint of Bloated Men

The indignities visited upon fat men — the wheezing, the chafing, the active indifference of women and the justifiable self-loathing it produces — are so numerous as to require a Torah-length scroll; but surely the death last week of James Gandolfini was an unexpected blow. As Lucas Mann recently wrote on Gawker, speaking for all the other fat men, his first thought was, "Man, I hope it was a plane crash." Mann is one of several writers who have decried the implicit fat-shaming in the accounts of Gandolfini's ignominous end. Just as we all feared, it was in fact a heart attack that brought him low, and the story only got worse on Saturday, when it was announced that the actor had no controlled substances in him, unless you count mortadella. The details were the worst news of all: The actor had been pounding rum shots and pina coladas, while at the same time wolfing down fried prawns and what an unnamed hotel source called "a large portion" of foie gras. This was worse than we ever feared. And it struck home with me especially, because on of my favorite things about The Sopranos was watching Tony eat.

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I don't have any illusions about how repulsive many viewers found it; that only made me like it more. I didn't care. Tony was fat, but he had balls. And it was uncanny how the show captured, again, how guys like me eat. The cold cuts gobbled standing up at the refrigerator, the unreheated pans of ziti, the big sandwiches and bialys; it was like seeing myself up there. Better still, Tony's eating was inextricably woven into how he did business: How many scenes featured him at Vesuvio, leaning over big plates of pasta to prevent his immaculate shirts from getting stained, and occasionally pausing to look up at people without moving his head? Though David Chase, his creator, couldn't forbear from using Tony's fatness as a mark of his moral corruption, the fact is that the character was never a comic or contemptible figure, even when he really packed on the pounds in later seasons. Vito Spatafore, Ginny Sack, Bobby Bacala may all have been bloated figures of fun, but never Tony. Not that Chase didn't do all he could to fat-shame him anyway. It pains me that in his fullest, deepest, most unabashed portrait of a man carrying too much weight, he was forced by his author to, late in the series' run, reduce himself, in what was meant to sound like a rare moment of clarity, as "a fat fucking crook from New Jersey." To Chase, it's not just that Tony was fat; his fatness was inextricably linked in Chase's puritanical mind with his towering id, his gross, shameless sybaritism.

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What he didn't get was that his appetites made me like Tony even more. There were those of us who wanted to high-five Tony every time he wolfed down his cannelloni or slept with his various neurotic mistresses. Then there was his appearance, which, for all its burden of extra weight, still somehow managed to avoid the usual disfigurements that come with fatness — the sagging pants, the pulled-up, puffy shirts, the spreading stains and bulging buttons. Tony's clothes all looked like they came from The Men's Wearhouse, but they fit him well, and he looked good in them. He took an oblivious pride in the way he looked; I certainly can't think of another character, fat or thin, who routinely dressed up to go to therapy. He even pulled off the big, yellow-gold Rolex President, the only person I have ever known to do so. All these aspects of Tony heartened us. George Costanza memorably had a poster of Dennis Franz on his wall, who occupied roughly the same place for bald men as Gandolfini did for the corpulent.

I realize that I am conflating James Gandolfini and the character he played. I can't help it; like the New York Daily News, I registered the bad news as "Tony's Dead." Emotionally, it's impossible for me, both as a man and as a fat person, to separate the two. As an actor, Gandolfini had a range three feet wide and ten miles deep, like most marginal characters. In the same way that Peter Dinklage pretty much always plays a mordantly witty, self-aware, sardonic dwarf, it was given to Gandolfini to portray the same character again and again. There was Gay Tony in The Mexican, Drunk Tony in Killing Them Softly, Evil Tony in True Romance, Department Store Tony in The Man Who Wasn't There, and, prior to that, Mook Tony in Get Shorty. The one time he tried to stretch, using a ridiculous squeaky voice, was in a movie where Robert Redford played a general. Ectomorphs may well agree that Gandolfini had it coming, and as much for being fat as for his drug use. Both behaviors seem equally depraved to them, and taken together, they offer proof, as they did to Chase, of the wages of sin. Which isn't fair. I know Gandolfini did a lot of blow, at least in his past, but so what? So did Miles Davis and Bam Bam Bigelow, and nobody holds it against them. It's depressing beyond measure to think that Tony died for the sin of eating fried shrimp. Or maybe it's inspiring. Either way, those are my issues; they were never Tony's, a man who ate well and un-neurotically. Now, if you will excuse me, there is capicola waiting for me in my refrigerator.